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mssmss writes "For a long time, I have been looking for a way to securely store my files online without being tied to a single vendor — whose survival my storage depends on. It looks like Wuala has a way to do this, according to this story in the Economist. They use donated disk space of users to scatter your encrypted files over multiple computers."

It's a pity, a truly distributed system could certainly be built, and it would look similar in many respects to this one. I suppose Wuala has no real incentive to build a system that doesn't need them, though.

And when the master server that knows where all those little pieces are goes down, you are still without your data.

Thank you! What do we have for our winner?

When I started reading TFS I assumed it was going to be some kind of distributed free storage service, that simply stores a copy of each file on multiple free online storage sites. As far as I'm concerned, this instead rates last after single service with a good backup plan and backing it up yourself./vertisement much?

You could say the same about almost every technology. Full disk encryption, digital cameras, the entire internet itself, all this makes the life of a child pornographer that much easier. Focus on the good uses of a technology, and let law enforcement do its job if someone misuses it.

In a distributed system of file chunks, you would never have access to what those chunks make up unless it is YOUR data, so I think its actually a lot safer than you think. In a system like this, all you're storing for other people is essentially random chunks - it would be very difficult to prove in court that you in fact were aware of the content this data belonged to and that you willingly supported a criminal.

Yeah, I can see the government not being particularly forgiving if that chunk of data on your harddrive happens to have childporn or something on it.
"No, really your honor, it wasn't my data. I was just sharing storage space with people online." Is not going to fly in court.

Even if you can point to the company's website "see, I was using this, ask them if I had any way to know what they put on my computer"? Especially since they must have some sort of index saying what they stored where, so you could ask for the relevant part of that.

The real issue isn't what would work in court, but what the media or HR people would do even without a conviction.

I concur, and I further assert that backup storage may be one of those things that just doesn't fit into a distributed model nicely. Having several physical copies of the data is 1000 times safer than several online copies, or parts of copies, any or all of which could be wiped out by the same affliction even if in different physical locations by virtue of the network that connects them.

1/100th of a mpeg or a jpg file depending on the file size is more than enough to show some underage girl getting nailed by a horse. Such formats can also be read without a file header by most software they can be viewed with.

that sorta defeats the purpose of having a shared online storage network. if everyone wanted to have total control over the space they donate, then instead of having one large public pool of online storage to be shared by everyone, you'd just have a bunch of small fragmented storage spaces or a bunch of disconnected groups of 5-6 people sharing a few gigabytes of storage. if that's the case then you might as well just call up a few of your friends and ask each other to hold onto your files for you.

the point of Wuala is so that they let you store whatever you want on the space they donate, and you let others do the same. it seems like a fair trade to me. obviously, if you don't want to share your disk space with strangers, then this service isn't for you. just build a RAID array.

Oh man, I wish the world had more people with your mentality. (IE: Don't pretend to be the highway patrol and pull in front of that speeder, get out of the way and let the patrol make their own money.) I'm being serious here. People don't know enough about how other people live in order to make life decisions for them. The same goes for government oversight of my life (you know... things like health care)

The only disk space I would be comfortable donating to this would be on a Truecrypted drive, so even if someone cracks their protection, it's secondarily protected by mine. If the cops seize my drive, they find nothing.

Love how people take a generic tool, useful to all areas, and reject them because one of the potential uses happens to be child pornography, terrorism, abortion, or whatever socially unacceptable behaviour is around in that particular moment. What will be next? Medicine because it will let live sick kiddie pron collectors?

I agree that are tools for which most if not all uses are negative (guns?). But for this particular one, the potential good uses are too broad to just deny the entire idea. And privacy will demand that noone should be able to see whats there except the owner.

About speed, i suppose that it will depend of what will be the main use of it. But the biggest speed hit (and limit) will be the originator of the info, not the whole internet (is not like i.e. video streaming, that have a lot of viewers)

Somehow I think anyone with such strong motives for privacy/stealth would set up their own darknet with something like WASTE, or combining features of both WASTE and this P2P-storage thing... that would be near-impossible to detect and expose.

The problem with thumb drives is you still need to store temporary files somewhere, in order to open them e.g. pictures/videos. There are few if any apps that download and process media in-memory.